a book of disquiet

What is it to be obsessed/obsessive? Is it synonymous with egoism? Clearly not in so many causes as it has more to do with the object rather than the id. And indeed can be either a force for good or ill? I think we all really wanted to like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen 'Billy Elliot' Daldry's) new film about a kid dealing (or not) with the trauma of losing his dad in the 9/11 Twin Towers collapse. But the film engenders anger rather than consolation/hope/imagination. Should the source novel be read? I almost did but at the end of the day thought better of it. A film becomes its own entity. And don't get me wrong. It is very much a film worth seeing if only to discover why so many people are still so very angry about 9/11. Not so much the event. The loss. But about the verboten unspoken. It's worth the ticket price alone to see Max von Sydow's silent performance - an entire film in itself: the 'renter' of the boy's aunt's apartment who lives across the street and who Oskar walkie-talkie's.

The 'renter' lived through an even greater trauma - that of the Dresden bombing and the holocaust. And my instinct tells me that Mr. Daldry made (inadvertently) a great film about not being able to make a sublime film that kissed the horrible flaws of what could have been THAT movie. We know Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks can ACT (as they exhibit here as ever consummately) and that they're constantly ridiculed for sorta not ever being considered as real actors. But they are so peripheral to this movie whose real star is Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn). And probably Mr. Daldry's great skill is in directing young talent/artists. But we sense that Oskar is screaming. Mr Daldry puts the kid on cinematic Prozac instead! Should he have gone further with the adults? It's difficult to say. But you almost feel that Sydow dared Mr. Daldry to force him to speak and that that dare was never taken up.

So much was unsaid about 9/11. To the extent that the prevailing winds couldn't even admit that loyal American citizens could possibly consider jumping out of a window in the face of adverse horror. To the point where film makers were demanded by government to erase images of 'the towers' from their movies to avoid...ahhhh...ummmm what exactly? If that's your starting point you have one helluva a climb to the pinnacle of any truth whatsoever. Does Oskar have Asperger's Syndrome or, moreover, does everybody else in their desperate longing to hug and 'reach out' to this child. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close attempts magic but plumets whimsy. And that makes one angry. How dare you tell me to move on, reach out to me when you've never experienced THAT kind of loss. It makes Oskar furious to the point where he 'steals' the answaphone with his Dad's last messages an places it with a facsimile machine so his Mum (nor anyone else but him) will ever hear them. And the child has finally convinced himself (rightly or wrongly) that the 'you' in that final message relates solely to him. And as we seethe with fury at how his Dad has been told to trust in the 'stay where you are and all will be fine' advise messages. Oskar will see/find the 'missing borough' of Manhattan on the far off hillside (that so oft his Dad mischievously had wafted about his child), traversed the valley, and summitted the mountain only to find that the golden windows of escape were a refection of whence he'd travelled.

In many ways Roman Polanski's Carnage (adapted from Yasmina Reza's play) is a far superior film in depicting the underbelly of Manhattan and yet in so many ways insubstantial compared to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close's soul of seeking enlightenment. It is very funny and very incredibly too close for comfort. The parents of two kids meet at one of their abodes (ultimately disintegrating) after the event of one 'sprog' assaulting the other in a playground. If either parents are anything to go by, the kids had little or none of the sense of life's wonder that Oskar's dad had instilled in him. For all Extremely Loud's frenetic New York actualite, Polanski's studio recreation of those denizen's inner lives breathes a far truer spark.

It's not easy to enjoy Bruno Dumont's films. But if one perseveres, you do feel as if you've touched the hand of some higher power. The real 'reaching out'. Twentysomething Céline (Julie Sokolowski) escaped the bourgeois claustrophobia of her parents, became Hadewijch (after a C13th mystic poet) in a nunnery but was so self-obsessed and devout that she was ostracised back to normality. A kindred spirit to Oskar in many ways in that they both think they see the light but it is merely a reflection of their own obsession. Céline attends a discussion group on “the notion of the invisible” incrementally magnetised to the 'boys' of a Islam group. Sokolowski's face is inescapable on the screen almost succeeding in convincing you that there is something irresistibly beyond. What results is somewhat of a profound understanding of how easy fundamentalism is incubated. Céline is more than a moth around a flame: she succumbs to the gravitational pull of her own reflection. The polar opposite of Simone Weil's philosophical writings/teachings of Gravity and Grace whereby one must empty oneself of the ego to be drawn to the centrifugal light.

a great synthesis of the great body of small partial truths

world enough and time
Copyright 2009 Andrew Lucre (with obvious free sources)

Do we really? Ever. Want to be where we are? Always hankering for somewhere/something at least once removed? Isn't the Christmas/New Year season a time where we inhabit that limbo or libidiness of just once in a lifetime? Do we take what seems such an innocent step into the shallow tide only to fall flat on our face in the countenance of a higher something. Curtis in Take Shelter (UK distributed by The Works) is perhaps the Everyman of our civilisation. He doesn't want to say 'I told you so' in post-self congratulation, rather, 'I think it is so' in celebration of what it is to behold our planet. Such is the magnetic truth of Jeff Nichols' film (also a Sundance 2011 hit) that any cavils are out-anchored by such a dictum. Particularly in America where normality is projected as so much of a given. After Lars von Trier's typical laser dissection of family-hiss in the face of Melancholia and Earth's extinction in all its Medusa beautification, Another Earth (opener for this year's Raindance Film Fest and this year's Sundance Fest hit and on general release by Fox Searchlight, Dec 9) proved an elegaic tale of how otherness ain't necessarily so. While there are many similarities to the 1969 Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (where everything is an earth but in reverse) Another Earth is more akin to the Philip K. Dick world of how everyday mundanity strangely proves the thing itself.

Fox Searchlight are proving to be a frontrunner for studio indie product: who'd have thought they'd ever take on a film for US distribution such as Shame (the latest from artist Steve McQueen)- Momentum releases in the UK. Like all McQueen's work to say it is 'about' something reduces the work to that only. Shame isn't just about sex addiction. It reeks of people trapped and embrassing architecture both of high-rise and its low-rise people. Of predicaments that are as unruly as the elements. And you'd have thought that the story of We Were Here had been recounted before but no. Sentiment that far outways sentimentality.

Terence Davies' adaption of Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea is another case in point. Anyone who knows their Rattigan knows that he was truly a dramatist precursor of John Osbourne's 'kitchen-sink' drama (reference the recent Royal National Theatre revivals) and not merely a slate to be wiped clean. Davies' film is a ballet of looks, desires, felled emotions in silent corridors that outweigh any historical context. Davies pushes the use of extant music to its exteme cinematic ends in his films - no less here than with Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto. Any film director who can match that lithe intensity let alone dance with its music of time should surely be allowed carte blanche to create whatever they wish in the future.

It's an interesting double-bill with Anthony Kimmins' My Own Executioner (B/W,1947) that had a rare showing (all that's available is a scratchy VHS copy) at Andrea Sabbadini's bi-ennial 6th European Psychoanalytic Film Festival this November. Conference delegate opinions were divided about the effectiveness of Kimmins Hollywood tropes e.g music, the trad romantic storyline but few were left unfascinated by the film's rare exploration of the analyst's daily practice and sometime dilemma in treating patients. Migration, the theme of this year's conference, also divided delegates. Some thought that the festival should have focusssed more on literal pycho-geographical films rather than those more to do with border crossings within the mind such as My Own Executioner, Hotel Sahara (Bettina Haasen, Germany, 2009) or the stories of steam room men in Steam of Life (Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen, Finland, 2010).

Yet Sabbadini's choices made for lively discussion and dissent foregrounding the important issue that the pain and trauma of displacement is relative only to the patient's own boundaries that may be even more destructive than anything literally geographic. How a film such as The Reverse (Borys Lankosz, Poland, 2009) couldn't obtain a wider release outside its native audience is tantamount to the fickle politics of world film distribution. It's use of poignancy and wit alleviating the burden of historical guilt crosses the divide of art-house and mainstream so very easily. And the denouement of mother/son reunification is a fascinating masochistic/sado-masochism. Should she have told her son who his father was really? Did she survive through denying her son knowledge? Is delaying the inevitable unearthing of history's walls preferable to its more immediate traumatic opposite? (One is reminded of one of this year's most provocative films Jim Loach's Oranges and Sunshine.) The festival opened with Charlie Chaplin's classic 1917 short The Immigrant and closed with Stefan Le Lay's 2009 short The Postcard about a seaside postcard come to life - its male figure falling (literally) for a girl on the opposite kiosk rack. Even with the transgression of boundaries a happy life is possible - and with the help of analysis it need not be just a sugar pill/rush alternative. A totally apposite way of ending the festival.

And if you fancied that paragraph:
Surviving Life -Jan Svankmajer
Ashes and Diamonds
Zelig
Hannah and Her Sisters
Midnight in Paris (out soon on DVD and Blu-ray)
and The Artist

Film and art aren't an escape from reality - in so many ways they ARE the reality. As actor Morgan Freeman said in a recent CNN interview, god resides in ourselves. In our actions. And it's sad that films are seen less and less in communal picture palace gatherings and so more often on a computer screen. The birth of cinema was a monadic epiphany - the one in many and the many in one as humans gathered to be personally awed and collectively challenged. Martin Scorsese's Hugo 3D (and the 3D is pin-point stunning) bear-hugs the beauty of cinema experience urging us to move on in our lives but not at the expense of forgetting and erasing the past. Adapted by John Logan from Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated childrens' book The Invention of Hugo Cabret it's about lost hearts and newfound happiness. And in that regard some may find it all just a wee unchallenging. Yet the film's innocence, grace and minutai of detail trick one into thinking you've seen more than you have. It isn't clever like Christopher Nolan or with the Jean-Pierre Jeunet's (Delicatessen) belligerent, bizarre joy. It is quite simply holding out a hand to feel the wind. Of dipping toes gingerly into the sea even though one senses there is no immediate danger. The film's biographical truth is Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) an extraordinary chap who, inspired by the Lumière Brothers, unsuccessfully tried to buy a camera from them and instead made his own, made his own films, directing, acting, supervising the sets, hand colouring the negatives - 531 films between 1896 and 1914 . Only to see WWI and most of the celluloid melted down into heels for ladies' shoes (200 films survived). A more depressing tale just could not be told.
A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) made in 1902 was restored in colour for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and the London Film Festival of this year screened before Roberto Rossellini's restored rarely seen 1952 comedy about morals, corruption and a magical camera that kills The Machine That Kills People.

And there's more than a sense at the end of the movie that the kids have have had a jolly good nourishing time but that the adults must close the book and get on with grown-up chores. It doesn't feel that this is inadvertent on Scorsese's part. One couldn't have hoped for better casting in Sacha Baron Cohen's dour railway station cop who relentlessly tries ridding the station of the pesky orphan kids. And one wonders whether his bitterness of life has only temporarily disappeared so scared both physically and mentally was he by a war. Kids will leave this film feeling rather smarter than their adults. Yet in that truth lies responsible on their part not to squander that youthful intelligence on manipulative techno frippery. Rather, to harness that observation for detail, their agility of thought, and not so much to create a better world but be cognoscent that they have that power first and foremost within themselves.
Pipilotti Rist's Eyeball Massage and George Condo at the Hayward Gallery (look out for the tiny surreal 'dolls house' twinkling the Internationale
and Gerhard Richter at the Tate Modern

With much the same message, Aardman, the wacky Wallace & Gromit animation Brit company, have teamed up with Sony for Arthur Christmas. It's a tour de force of technical wizardry and character detail that's unlikely to leave anyone disgruntled (except maybe an old fogey of a reindeer).

Make Someone Happy (Performed by Bill Nighy)
Arthur Christmas (Suite) - Harry Gregson Williams
Tony Bennett/Bill Evans - Make Someone Happy
vintage (that only youth will provide) 1963 Stevie Wonder:

Doris Day
Judy Garland performed live at the Russel Hotel in London, 29 November, 1964. Judy was appearing for her fan-club, and was accompanied by future husband Mark Herron at the event.
Barbra Streisand (2009).
and the version that inspired them:
And just because they were such an adorable pair of songwriters some Comden and Green: Comes once in a Lifetime from their musical Subways are for Sleeping- Judy Garland's version
Doris Day: Who Knows What Might Have Been recorded on Nov. 21, 1961
Mary Martin - Never Never Land fromPeter Pan)

it never is like a story

Perhaps a clarification is needed. Far from criticising the annual BFI London Film Festival this blog has nothing but applause for its ability to muster 150 odd films into a coherent force of cinema appreciation. Having managed to see about 75% of those this year I can speak from experience. Yet like any large organisation factions will always form fostering single agendas. One I've heard verbalised over the years is "we're not interested in entertainment". All that can be voiced in response to that is, one man's poison is another man's socialism. To even think that the woes of a nation's people are galvanised around an 'art house' film is of course ridiculous. On a weekend they are off watching a Hollywood movie rather than seeing themselves cavort on screen and would be doing so even without the marketing strategies of a major studio. There are of course exceptions like Brazil's police corruption Elite Squad now in its sequel release.

That's not to say that the likes of Ken Loach exposing moral and political hypocrisy have had their day. By no means true. But I felt this year at the London Film Festival, and have always felt, that the Festival continues to survive and succeed not through offering an alternative cinematic politics, rather, by celebrating the diversity of cinema's possibilities: one man's 'entertainment' is another man's 'watching paint dry'.

Such musing congealed this week through watching 4 DVD re-issues of Francis Ford Coppola's work: The Outsiders (1983), The Conversation (1974), One from the Heart (1982) and Hammett (1982, directed by Wim Wenders at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in California). And the irony of much good work born out of Hollywood is that it would only have had a life in the first place thanks to the independents in film production. A point often missed by Tinseltown's critics. Paramount, for example, only agreed to make The Conversation because of Coppola's The Godfather success - keeping him happy until he made Part 2. Warner Brothers turned down most of Coppola's early scripts such as American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and cut roughly 22 minutes from The Outsiders in order to liven the pace and focus on one character - all restored in this DVD version from 2003. Yet it's those very two qualities that make The Outsiders what it is: a sweeping 'Gone With the Wind' story of three brothers. Not the childhood survival story of just one kid.

Opinions have always been divided about Coppola's work but undeniable is his love of cinema - paraded upon the big screen. I confess to have always been smitten with that parade. The Outsiders romantic theme (composed by Coppola's father Carmine and sung by Stevie Wonder) oughta seem smaltzy. But it fits the cinemascope camera work like a glove (Coppola, as always, trying new techniques in this movie such as split diopters). This isn't and was never meant to be like a Dardennes brothers movie of human 'reality' (for want of a better word). Coppola was begged to make a film of S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel by a school class in his local town of Fresno who even signed a petition. This was post Apocalypse Now and Coppola was working on a relatively low budget. And from an audition of around 1,000 unknowns, he and his casting director/producer Fred Roos launched the careers of Tom Cruise (pre Risky Business), Matt Dillon, Partick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe. The 2-disc DVD is loaded with extras including a commentary from Coppola and one from the 2003 cast reunion for the new cut. "After you everyone in my life was a bozo," laments Patrick Swayze of Coppola.

Listening to Coppola's commentary on The Conversation you see why such an accolade is heartfelt and not just shootin' some breeze. The DVD extras of Coppola's original script dictation tapes (to be typed up by his assistant) at a local cafe are just fascinating. This is all further enhanced by Walter Murch's separate commentary - being his first editing job and non-union he was credited with sound montage. For a general audience both commentaries will be intriguing. For the die hard cineastes Murch has some great editing and art direction tips, we learn that the first cut was 5 hours, that Haskell Wexler was originally DP but there was a falling out, and that Harry's dream sequence was supposed to end the film (Coppola's dictated ending was different again). Composer David Shire had hoped for a big orchestral score but it was Coppola who persuaded him to write the solo piano score (Shire reveals in his interview extra that it was this score that generated most of his work ever since): a score cleverly sound mixed by Murch as the film progresses.

No extras (alas) on One from the Heart and Hammett but what CINEMA. At one point you wish Coppola had just gone the whole hog and made the former a musical. But then you realise that's precisely the point: that it isn't. It is all real or rather sur-real. And wow, remember the great Raul Julia, looks to kill and a dancer/singer. And oh, Nastassja Kinsky as a lonely, errant circus performer. This IS about the ordinary lives of people struggling to be someplace else in their head. And who better to bring the tattered glitter of our imaginations to town than Tom Waits. "The most highly implausible thing I've ever seen in my life."

Pierre Thoretton's documentary on fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent L'Amour Fou may seem a strange segue. But what is different here is that Pierre Bergé's (his partner in business and love) reflections aren't simply a bio-pic of the man. The details of his art and antique collecting, his houses - the Normandy 'Proustian' dacha, the grand auction after his death, aren't just celebrations of dead objects. As Bergé put it they are like birds flying away to a new life rather than a coffin. And he creates an image of Yves Saint Laurent as a man in constant search of escape. His couture would take flight giving women "confidence and allowing them to assert themselves". He was 2 years ahead of the student occupation of the Odeon theater by creating ready to wear (prêt-à-porter) clothes reflecting the needs of the street. "He was never fooled by haute couture," notes Bergé. Like most artists, perhaps, he achieved in his art what he couldn't in life "an absolute purity...a kind of [musical] harmony...the more you simplify, the more you risk boring people". Screening at the ICA Nov 7 (DVD Nov 21).

So much of this year's BFI London Film Festival had films of escape, the road, of a past that would never be hence - the staples of cinema. What price fame in Miss Bala (general release, Oct 28) where a young Mexican girl, by accident, is caught up in a drug cartel war. She has no choice but to win the beauty pageant (rigged in her favour) and co-operate with the government coup. Perhaps a scenario not as far away from one's doorstep as we'd like to believe.

The protagonist in Americano (debut directed by Mathieu son of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy) travels to Mexico in a strange search for his dead mother's friend. The strands wrap together maybe a little too neatly in pursuing Lola (some of life does!) but it's an inventive, stylised journey recommended worth the taking if or when it's ever released. Las Acacias (released by Verve, Dec 2) won director Pablo Giorgelli this year's prestigious Sutherland Award. Nothing happens on this lumber truck trek from Paraguay to Buenos Aires but of course we watch the man and his 'hitchhiker' with baby in lap. And by simply watching maybe we remember more about the world around us. Raindance offered attention holding parallel road trips either side of the Pacific in All That Remains while Spanish director Alberto Morais's 80 year old widower begins inhabiting his Spanish Civil war past on his road trip, The Waves (Las Olas) (LFF).

Still yet to be UK released is Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night (2006) from last year's LFF. She obviously has a fan base here 'cause the Saturday matinee of her latest The Loneliest Planet (in one of the larger Vue cinemas) was 'technically' sold out and in reality certainly near that. If you hadn't read Loktev's festival catalogue entry, "how do you forgive someone that does not want to be forgiven?" you'd be asking similar questions anyway after seeing this film. It mirrors the intensity of Day Night Day Night but revolves around two hikers, their guide and a wilderness. Is HERE from American music video director Branden King any less focussed than Loktev as he follows two trekkers - a satellite mapper and a photographer to Armenia? An unfair comparison perhaps but an interesting one in discussing the power of cinema.

Brit debut Junkhearts falls far short of most of the aforementioned films -it did, however, earn Candese Reid Best Actress at this year's Fest Awards. Actor Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill (LFF) was an extremely accurate depiction of a London ex-crim trying to go straight and be an initially reluctant single dad. It ain't a happy nor contrived ending. Sparks fly from the dialogue of gay themed Weekend (opening this week), and though it's well worn territory there's much that's sizzlingly fresh from the cast and director in early 'Godard-ian' mode Andrew Haigh. Or was it Rohmer? I'm not sure he was thinking of either;) Another Brit debut Broken Lines (from last year's LFF) has been out a month plus, so catch the DVD. Strong performances (including Paul Bettany against type as a beleaguered boxer) and a keen sense of screen sculpting from director Sallie Aprahamian.

Award for Best Brit feature at Raindance this year went to Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke's Stranger Things. A grieving young Oona returns to her deceased mother's house striking up a rapport with the resident tramp. Many will find it more engaging than Junkhearts and Eyal and Burke are well on top of their actors and concept. Whether Johnny Daukes' Acts of Godfrey will ever get a release is anyone's guess! But it's one of the funniest, most original things to emerge in ages out of Brit cinema. Anyone remember Richard Jones' production of La Bête that played Broadway and the West End? Well Godfrey is all in rhyming verse as well - Simon Callow (narrator) must have fallen off his chair in amazement when this script hit his palate. Divine intervention, sales motivation, love and revenge meet Pam Ayres is the pitch. Believe it or not it works! American writer/director Andy Viner's sitcom/vampire/horror Dick Night was also clever fun and deserving of being seen more widely. Norwegians in Los Angeles Marie Kristiansen/Patrik Syversen have a great future given their DSLR feature Exteriors. Two struggling young actresses, two 'a-hole' boyfriends but the result is reminiscent of John Cassevetes.
At The Zabludowicz Collection is the first UK solo exhibition of US photographer/video artist Laurel Nakadate, and the way her photos soak in 'light' are quite compelling.

Across the pond in New York Jack Goes Boating (out this week in London) is Philip Seymour Hoffman's directing debut (also acting in most scenes) that will surely warm your heart. More than that? Well, does it need more than that is really the question? Based on Bob Glaudini's play (originally performed by Hoffman, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) the film easily out-runs most actor/director debuts. Or indeed directing debuts full stop. If we crave 'more than that' it boils down to the script that we've sorta heard before: ordinary people trying to make do with being ordinary. Is Jack not being able to cook or swim a-typical ordinary? In learning to do these things to get the attention of the girl stuck selling funerals Connie (Amy Ryan) extraordinary? Glaudini's play, for many tastes, may just get too stuck on being normal. Hoffman elevates these characters (including his own) to stalwarts in Manhattan's shifting neuroses. But there's an even stranger heart yearning to break loose in Hoffman's performance and we long to be pumped through those extra-ordinary arteries. We don't necessarily want to go Terry Gilliam waltzing in Grand Central (Fisher King) but we sure don't want to go back to driving the limo ourselves. It's not wrong to dream; only errant to delude ourselves that we are the king.
Charms and Miracles continues at the Wellcome Institute (Video interviews HERE). And I'm too late in mentioning Bill Fontana's sound sculpture for the Institute's front entrance. Sorry...but get a taste of it HERE. And you missed Audio Obscura - a new sound work by poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw conceived for the public spaces of St Pancras International. Wandering around with her stories in my ears was a great way of retreating from the nerves of heaving travelers. The result was creating a third narrative all of one's own.

And a new Picturehouse cinema has just opened in Hackney. Distributed by the same company, artist Miranda July's second feature The Future opens this week. Too whimsical? Insubstantial? It's Miranda July, she's predictably unpredictable. And quite possibly extraordinary? Jacques Deray's little seen La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) (1969) has received a very nice clean up (out on Blu-ray): Alain Delon and a tres jejeune Jane Birkin wandering around a Côte d'Azur pool scantily clad. But the co-script with Jean-Claude Carrière is quite a subtle satire on aspiration and the idle rich and becomes almost Brechtian when Michel Legrand's song Ask yourself why? chimes in over the soirée.

Last night of After Dark Extreme Scare – The Human Centipede - a Halloween tie in for the sequel to The Human Centipede2 (Full Sequence) film (7pm to late from October 31st). Featured sets recreating the horror of the film, including the evil Dr Heiter’s laboratory, clips from the film and audio as well as the main attraction - a live human centipede. Sure beats pumpkins;)

I am not offended that these creatures (that's the word)
Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
Pay so little heed to me. It's part of a complicated
Flirtation routine...John Ashbery

It's a shame the general release of Ralph Fiennes' film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (London Film Festival, LFF) doesn't co-incide with the opening this week of Anonymous for it would serve only the greater purpose of promulgating these Elizabethan plays rather than detracting from either film. Anonymous posits that Shakespeare the man didn't exist at all and was actually a pseudonym for the politically powerful Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) - plays were deemed "the work of the devil" so he couldn't possibly use his own name. Director Roland Emmerich turned many a brow when this action/disaster movie director came on board to direct John Orloff's script. Turns out he does a damn fine job much to the chagrin of his detractors.

Does the film convince you of the case for 'anon'? Well, yes in so much as throughout history anyone seen to rock the establishment will be under scrutiny. And it takes not only a brave human writer but one that can withstand "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to survive 'the powers that be'. Rare that an artist can cope with that and politics was no more rife than in the Elizabethan court. I digress for a minute to note that I have my own London Film Festival cross to bear, for politics is rife there as well. Festival PRs decreed that I couldn't film any of the Anonymous press conference with my little DSLR (the big boy dinosaur cameras were stabled at the back;). They also denied struggling filmmakers this privilege of independent publicity too: the ones who really needed it. At the George Clooney press conferences you couldn't move for a sea of iPhones, iPads and other filming devices. Hypocrisy can be the only word for PR censure of hand-held devices. In fairness, I am yet to receive comment in this regard from Anonymous's distributor Sony - one company that has always appeared more open than other studios to widening its appeal to independent debate.

You have what are essentially 3 (or arguably 4 festivals going on at the BFI London Film Festival)
1. the more 'socialist' orientated films that will always have minority audiences though through no fault of their quality;
2. This aesthetic in tandem with the BFI's (British Film Institute) remit to preserve and promulgate the history of cinema both new and archival;
3. The more mainstream films e.g. Anonymous and Coriolanus whose studio or mini-major distributors use the LFF to create a PR platform for their imminent release;
and 4. films both experimental and otherwise that defy these former categories and while probably in tune with the BFI aesthetic would rather exist outside that rubric e.g. Phil Solomon's American Falls (earlier work of his screened at the Tate Modern Thurs Oct 27 and a video interview with me to come) or Joseph Cedar's Cannes Fest award winning Footnote - the director quipped at the Q&A last night that even though he arrived for his screening in a marked Festival car, the red carpet was clearly not for him and he had to convince 6 people on the way that he was indeed a festival filmmaker! Out of the 80 odd films I've seen at the Fest Footnote would have to be at least in the top 5.

What all this has to do with the film Anonymous is fairly clear I think. Joseph Cedar is from Tel Aviv, not from the occupied territories or their allies. Friends in some cities can be thin on the ground. And his film is all to do with belonging, of not so much finding the truth insomuch as finding if not happiness then contentment between a father and son. That's where the war should begin, resolve and end - not in the wider realms Cedar seems to say. De Vere in Anonymous has everything he could desire and so too his sons. Yet he is allowed power without a voice. "You have no voice that's why I chose you," he barks to his surrogate purporting to be Shakespeare. De Vere's fatal flaw is not his vanity but his love of art and poetry and his belief that the world could be a different place. He pens Richard III to inspire a political revolt. Footnote questions not so much the notion of authenticity but how we as humans inevitably bend our ego towards an acknowledgement of our talents in the form of medals, prizes, disputed lands and ideals. Or in John Ford's world: if the legend becomes truth, print the legend. That's until a real historian like Simon Schama comes a-digging up the daffodils.
Grigori Kozintsev's often gutting and spellbinding Russian versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971) are B/W classics just out on DVD (wish Mr Bongo would hurry up with their new website -it's been months!). Kozintsev really does make the world a stage to behold our swelling scene.

More family strife in Lynne Ramsay's much anticipated adaptation of Lionel Shriver's book We Need To Talk About Kevin (LFF and now on general release). Easy viewing this ain't but Ramsay and her production team create a world in every frame - the angle of light, the design on a costume, the textures of our lives. Is it all too much? Perhaps, but this is cinema aiming to really get under your skin so that you leave the cinema seeing the world a little or even a whole lot more. The 'social realist' Dardenne brothers offered The Kid with a Bike that has wowed every critic on every continent. And the end really is worth the wait. Seen in isolation this, of course, is a fine film choking with nuances. But as my brain wizzes through all the LFF films it doesn't seem to fall in the top 5. Perhaps Louise Wimmer (a first feature from Cyril Mennegun) does - a film whose subject would normally make me doubtful. A performance from little known French stage actress Corinne Masiero capturing magnificently the character's "insignificance in the eyes of others". I'm still asking myself why this film affected me more than most.

Should Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn have the last word this week? Perhaps not. But I wondered hard about what it would be like to be a youngster watching this awesomely executed motion-capture movie. Would I be inspired by that sense of cinematic wonder? Or would I have already been bludgeoned into submission by all the technology about me? Just to wonder about wonder was enough for me in a world that persists in keeping us in a box - albeit a very shiny one for some.

A colleague asked of me the other day, don't they all (the dozens of films I've seen at the London Film Festival) all blur into one? And in one sense yes, but rather in a good clear way so that one's final picture is minutely detailed. And all because every film (the many good ones) only help sign post you to the next. And with two actor directed 'political' features screening in the same week - Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus (opens Jan 20, UK) and George Clooney's The Ides of March (opens Oct 28, UK)- it does "give us pause" as Shakespeare said to consider the reality/the fiction/the fact/and the future nay, the past. Are we forever bound on a wheel of fire or is it that we been allowed pause to quench our thirst?

Actor/director Philip Seymour Hoffman hit the home run when he said at yesterday's press conference for Ides of March that acting for him was to "de-mystify what it is to be a human being". Some will no doubt say that the film in question is somewhat derivative not giving its audience a cleverer unseen take on the bandwagon for American Presidency. And that indeed may be true. But Clooney (no surprise playing the wannabe President) directs the adapted play with knife-like precision. It's a science/biology lesson: it doesn't immediately seem that exciting but the more one watches and questions the more you become Aristotle fleeing the boredom of Athens mediocrity and off dissecting frogs in some far off island lagoon. What is ego? What the hell am I voting for anyway? Is loyalty just some Darwinian fin that was a rather useless appendage or was it at the heart of the evolutionary chain?

Why Coriolanus has often been deemed a Shakespeare problem play I shall never know. Always it seemed rapier-like slicing through the thinly disguised pudgy flesh of false democratic ideals. It was never thus that the great general Coriolanus was arrogant/egotistical/belittling. He was a man who knew who he was, got on and did the things he believed in; didn't sit around enjoying being idly flattered by the masses great and small. Though Fiennes has updated the play its clarity of decimating the hypocrisy of democracy didn't really need it. What the adaptation does, though, is make palpably clear the hidden agendas of all the surrounding characters - James Nesbitt egging on 'the crowd' to fell Coriolanus' oak tree that his philandering thistle could never nor hope to be. Brian Cox's Whitehall honeybee buzzing from one conflict flower to the next yet none too fussy about successful pollination.

A more contemporary play about power and the people would be hard to find. As Seymour Hoffman said in the Ides press conference, there really aren't any heroes in life only flawed humans. Coriolanus' flaw isn't ego (which of course he has in spades like anyone else) it is his Hotspur temper. He denounces the populace as curs because he's sick and bloody tired of playing politics and having to be nice and 'play upon them like a flute'. He believes 'all that' should be left to his political underlings while he gets on with running the country. His underlings get him hot under the collar but have no one to put in his place. Very like protestors who want change but offer no alternatives.

People, alas, are fickle - not all but enough of them to weigh heavy on the heart of democratic realities and ideals. Coriolanus acknowledges the illusion and is smart enough to know that it's somewhat necessary: as long as he's required not to sing and dance. The Artist is a sad and wondrous film that is sort of a silent B/W grand opera (in that all - well most- opera is political in nature). Hollywood matinee idol George finds he's relegated to the potato patch with only his dog for company when the talkies arrive. His ultimate saviour is ironically the girl who serendipidously slipped under the red ropes dividing the people from their idols - George promulgating Peppy as a new starlet. The talkies embrace her though not George. The plotting is predicable but French director Michel Hazanavicius' comic execution is far from it. No surprise for anyone who saw that director's secret service spoofs OSS - every comic nuance handled like a racing car spinning hill-top curves.

Politician's lives are always to be on the knife-edge of the populace, not so for most entertainers. Arguably, so should be the former in a democracy. As Clooney's candidate confesses about the death penalty - if someone killed his family then he'd probably feel like doing similar to the perpetrator. But he would need to serve his time for that act of revenge he stresses. The awesome, sublime quality of Shakespeare's play is that ultimately Coriolanus' fatal flaw is his heart not his head. The people would never let him sit upon a hill. They wanted to bait the monster that lay dormant within themselves. And as in relationships they lost the only beautiful thing that simply dropped down dead. Life thankfully isn't like the movies (more of that debate to come...) and though George in The Artist never has a voice (or will he?) he retains his heart whilst allowing another to flourish. Who could argue with that? Not even Karl Marx!

Gus van Sant's Restless (LFF and on general release this week) - shot by Harris Savides in halcyon hues though with pin-prick accuracy - seems superficially a little old-fashioned. Rather than being lazy, though, van Sant seems to be invoking the origin of the Love Story terminal death cliche spinning a dormant web in which his teenage characters can round out their lives in a little sleep. You cry not because you're being manipulated but because so often life's beauty and crazy zest for a life outside the norm only ever comes to the fore and fruition in moments of tragedy. And photographer Andrew Dosunmu's debut about Senegalese in New York Restless City (last chance Fri at the Brixton Ritzy) avoids all the cliches conjuring a world between the cracks - immigrant lichen clinging and thriving creating a whole new sub-culture.

Peter Sasowsky interview now live and new photos.

the half-heard radio sings its song of sidewalks

"It's good not to accept the current reality as eternal and definitive," wrote surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. What better quotation to get one through these days of so-called London normality. Tube disruption last week has been its worst in ages (and this week isn't shaping up any better) but Mayor Boris brought a smile to our faces - not through his policies - but through his image looming large on the posters for extra-marital dating agency Ashley Madison. All publicity is good publicity as 'they' say. And instead of the 'Boris bike' to ease our passage up those congested London streets we might consider the 'Boris bonk'. Or as the Mayor said recently about next year's sporting event, we're ready now!

Onwards and upwards...but a lucky few with any energy left after the city's strenuous pycho-somatic workout have/will be immersing their bods in one of the city's autumn film festivals or its art fairs and gallery openings. Why do all these films exist? Why do all these crazy people keep wanting to make movies when it's hard enough to keep body and soul alive these days? Is it simply maybe a capitalist system keeping both right and left just so happy? At the independent film fest Raindance (still ensconced in the intimate Apollo Cinema boudoir) box office receipts are up 40.3% on last year -as is much other cultural/entertainment activities in the city. One young filmmaker from Berlin asked me if London "knew about Raindance?" - a question slightly missing but illuminating the point that 'normal' people are indeed looking for a way out if not a way forward from their 'humdrum' existence. Josh Golding (author of the forthcoming Maverick Sreenwriting: A Manual for the Adventurous Screenwriter) gave a talk on how a filmmaker can enable audiences to "see the world as they've never seen it before": to think outside the box.

Each Raindance year, one 'shorts' filmmaker is awarded the chance to make the trailer for the following year's fest (this year it was Alex Brook Lynn who made last year's I am A Fat Cat). Next year will be Nicolangelo Gelormini (Reset) -a former assistant of Italian Paolo Sorrentino whose first film in America This Must Be the Place screens at this year's 55th BFI London Film Festival (Sean Penn in Oscar winning mode as a 'Goth' rock star on the road in search of his father's Nazi friend; America's nowhere 'architecture' in stunning cinematography). At the Raindance Awards party Gelormini made a plea to ignite the flames of Italian cinema - not just remembering its greatness and not to relegate that country's contribution to simply a thing of the past. And if after watching Martin Scorsese's 4 hour adventure in cinema My Voyage to Italy (out on DVD) he hasn't convinced you to watch every single movie he mentions in its entirety then nothing will. Rossellini's film of the title "was reviled when it was first released and only later championed by the French New Wave directors". And De Sica's Umberto D had the Italian culture minister Andreotti publish "an open letter in which he declared his opposition to neo-realism for washing dirty linen in public, [wanting] de Sica and his fellow filmmakers to be more optimistic." Plus ça change...
Ken Loach continues at the BFI

In epic doco mode lately, Scorsese's 3.5 hour George Harrison: Living in the Material World is also just released on DVD. Does it need to be so long? Well it's certainly not boring and the first 90min is taken up, inevitably, with Harrison's time with The Beatles. What one ultimately walks away with above all from this documentary, though, is just how hard it is to survive the fame others project upon you. All the Pranayamas in the world couldn't save George Harrison from himself. But Paul and Ringo live on, and there are some very fascinating and funny if maybe not quite soul-revealing footage. Arguably, George Harrison's fans (and of course those of The Beatles) felt they were seeing the world through a different lens through listening to their idols. Another doco worth seeking out is Lawrence of Belgravia (London Film Festival, LFF hereafter) charting the trials and tribulations of this 'underdog' musician. (reviews embargoed until Oct 22)

That 'different lens' is this year's 'motto' for the Raindance Fest too. And as in previous year's many of the greatest delights of this festival lay in documentaries that may have trouble seeing the light of a projection screen for some time. This year's Award winner How to start a Revolution documented Gene Sharp and his 'velvet' non-violent revolutionary guide book From Dictatorship to Democracy. Some of his methods of undermining the symbols and pillars of power can be seen in action in The Green Wave (cinemas now)- Iran's bloggers' promulgation of the rigged presidential elections on June 12th, 2009. Where My heart Beats (Raindance) proved that a very personal rather than objective documentary can still pack an effective political punch. The same goes for The Boy Mir and Hell and Back Again (both on general release) - the latter documenting an American marine wounded in Afghanistan and returned to his hometown. There's no attempt by the filmmakers to allow their gun/kill-loving subject likability in any way - just a man doing his job. And whereas filmmakers previously had to choose between beauty of the image and getting the documentary facts, the latest DSLR's and video empower one with both. Richard Jobson's highly stylised The Somnambulists plays at the LFF (reviews embargoed until Oct 14)

Against the facts, the drama of immigrant Iraqis in London on the eve of the Allied invasion Mesocafe can fall somewhat flat. But first feature Raindance course graduate Ja'far 'Abd al-Hamid has a real command of actors and can write lines that stick out a mile for their incisiveness into the human political dilemma. Why did he shoot on Super 16 rather than digi, though?

Inevitably, many of the most memorable features and documentaries of both Raindance and the LFF are all to do with outsiders and society's escapees. The doco Darwin (LFF) is a fascinating, funny and poignant glimpse of the 35 lives in this tiny, off-grid Californian town. SXSW Fest hit Dragonslayer (LFF) is more an acquired indie taste getting up close and personal to sometime skateboarder Josh and his new girlfriend. As vérité as it may be, its the sort of doco that could just as easily be a fiction rather than us watching it fight for its documentary corner. Phoebe Hart, born half male/half female, picks up a camera and tells her fascinating story in Orchids-My Intersex Adventure (Raindance). Another Ozzie, rock journalist Lilian Roxon, who hung out with 70s legends was profiled in Mother of Rock: Lilian Roxon (Raindance). And the Japanese Matsuo Ohno who sound engineered all those weird Astro Boy 60s effects is found sprightly as ever producing the annual play at a disabled people's home - The Echo of Astro Boy's Footsteps (Raindance): "If he stopped experimenting he'd have no reason to live," notes a former colleague. But equally, "his tendency to move on means he doesn't develop."

Peter Sasowsky's Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis (Raindance) on this extraordinary artist/scientist was inspiring, riveting and ultimately a depressing comment on how our society prefers R&D ideas that can be brought to fruition ASAP rather than broadening the minds of our planet. Joe Davis did finally end up with a post at Harvard- unpaid! (Video interview)

As an alternative to the art fair domination of Frieze, Ed Winkleman has brought his Moving Image video festival from New York to London's Oxo Barge House (just near the Tate) this weekend. On Saturday, October 15, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, in collaboration with Film Co Lab, Moving Image will present Bring Your Own Beamer(or BYOB). Each artist will choose the work to be exhibited and bring his or her own projection apparatus. It's a managable fest to get around too with famous and not so names. Probably unfair to single out any particular artists. But you won't be disappointed.


to be continued...